Andrew Rossi’s Documentary About the Met Gala, The First Monday in May, Premieres Tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival

Everyone knows that the Met Gala is the fashion world’s equivalent of the Super Bowl. But what most of us don’t know—how could we?—is what happens before all those celebrities walk up the 150-foot red carpet. How does this night come together?

We get an answer to that question in The First Monday in May, a new documentary by Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times), premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival tonight and opening in theaters this Friday. Filmed with the cooperation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vogue, this behind-the-scenes procedural is a celebration of the 2015 gala and the smash show, “China: Through the Looking Glass,” that was its inspiration.

The film carries us through the whole process, from Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton’s original conception of the exhibition through gala night itself, when Rihanna arrives in that spectacular canary-yellow gown by Chinese designer Guo Pei and later performs “Bitch Better Have My Money.” We follow Bolton’s consultations with Vogue Editor in Chief Anna Wintour, her planning for the gala (with helpful advice from Baz Luhrmann), and the choice of the great Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai as the show’s artistic director. Even as we hear from designers like Galliano, Gaultier, and Lagerfeld, we see the seemingly thousands of small decisions that go into making a hit exhibition and a hugely profitable fundraiser like the Met Gala.

If you’ve ever grown nervous planning a dinner party, the preparations for the Met Ball will send a chill down your spine. Talk about complex. The New York Times once dubbed the Met Ball “Anna Wintour’s Party,” and to judge from the film, this seems fair. She approaches it with a hands-on meticulousness that I wish the Bush administration had managed during the invasion of Iraq. She’s involved in every decision—including the design of the napkins and the tablecloths and the seating chart for the guests, a group so staggeringly famous that figuring out where to put them is like playing chess with pieces who will walk off the board if they don’t like the square they’re on.

If the gala is Wintour’s party, the exhibition itself is the brainchild of the English-born Bolton, who curated the Met’s blockbuster “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” show in 2011 and spent the next years looking for something to match it. The First Monday in May shows us just how hard it is to pull off a show like “China: Through the Looking Glass.” It’s not simply that the whole thing is massive—three times bigger than any previous Costume Institute show—but that Bolton, Wong, and co. are faced with all manner of turf wars and intellectual complexities.

For starters, there are some at the Met who feel that fashion is frivolous and doesn’t deserve to share the same space as High Art. (These traditionalists seem unaware that they lost this cultural argument well before the 1960s, around the time of Dada.) Then there’s wrangling with the Met’s Asian Art Department, whose head fears that the “Through the Looking Glass” show will overwhelm the “real” Asian art with a Disneyfied version. As if that weren’t enough, the show’s very conception must take into account profound Chinese sensitivity about the West’s historical appropriation, exploitation, and misrepresentation of China. If you put the Mao section of the exhibition in the Met’s room full of Buddhas, Wong tells Bolton, you’ll offend both the communists and the Buddhists.

After all these ideological matters finally get sorted out—not to mention Bolton’s choosing 150 garments, flying to examine the Yves Saint Laurent vaults in Paris, and agonizing over delays in the building of the displays—the exhibition is put together in a mad rush over the final few days. Perhaps because Bolton looks a bit like a grown-up Harry Potter, the show comes together magically in the end. It’s rapturously beautiful.

So beautiful, in fact, that it broke the McQueen show’s attendance record. Of course, this only sets the bar for his next show even higher. And will he reach it? We’ll find out the first Monday in May.